The Four Color Media Monitor

Popverse is telling that Marvel's newest event called Blood Hunt is even worse than the title suggests:

If you’re reading Blood Hunt #1 (written by Jed MacKay and penciled by Pepe Larraz) at a bookstore or a digital comics store, then you aren’t getting the full story. According to Marvel, the original version of their vampire invasion epic was so graphic that they had to remove some of the content. However, the original pages are available – but only at comic book stores. No large chain booksellers or Comixology, if you want to see the unrated version of Blood Hunt, you need to head to your local comic book shop.

The unrated version, known as Blood Hunt: Red Band #1, is part of an initiative to help comic book stores. Speaking at a recent retailer meeting, Marvel publisher Dan Buckley laid out the strategy. "To get these bloody takes, fans need to pick up comics in your stores," Buckley said.

Well that's some "initiative" alright. One the stores are making a serious mistake to be participating in to begin with. The list of bloodletting moments is as follows:

• The first (and most obvious) difference is the cover and title page. The title page is red (the standard edition is white), and it contains an explicit content sticker. In case you still haven’t gotten the message, there is a warning telling readers that the comic is only approved for appropriate audiences.
• Page 12 (after the key players page) includes severed heads and mutilated bodies. People are being thorn in half, and vampires are chewing on body parts. The standard edition has this scene edited to remove all the extra gore.
• Page 13 is almost identical to what we see in the standard edition, but there is more gore, and the water in South Korea is now filled with blood and floating corpses.
• The Avengers battle against the Structure vampires contains an extra page that isn’t in the standard edition. The extra page is placed after page 28 when the vampire known as Bloodstorm One impales Black Panther. We get a closer look at Thor’s injuries, and we see Wanda struggling to maintain her concentration as her face is splattered with blood. The page ends with Bloodstorm One impaling Black Panther for a second time (OUCH).
• After Sam Wilson teleports away (page 29 of the standard edition) we get an extra page that isn’t in the standard edition. We see New York City engulfed in chaos, as vampires rip apart a human corpse, heads paced on pikes, and the streets are filled with blood. An unseen figure narrates the carnage, stating that this has “always been my work.”
• The narration continues into the next page, which is page 31 of the standard edition. We get an extra caption of the mysterious mastermind’s narration, otherwise the Red Band edition page is identical to what you’re seeing in the standard edition.
• The cliffhanger page in the standard edition (page 35) is a lot tamer than what you get in the Red Band edition. In the standard edition Blade impales Doctor Strange through the back, with the sword exiting Strange’s body through his chest. The Red Band edition has a completely new version of the page, with Blade slicing Strange’s mid-section, cutting the sorcerer’s body in half. You see blood, and you see entrails. It’s gory.

It's not something any true Marvel fan should crave. Yet Popverse describes all this without an ounce of objectivity, and that would be enough to stay away from such an atrocity. And Blade is made to look like a villain here? That's very bad alright. I did not get into reading superhero fare for all this.

One must wonder, of course, how this'll be reprinted in trades, even though it'd be a huge mistake to finance this story consumer-wise. No doubt, when it comes to trades, the printed editions with all their graphic violence will end up as the ones to see reprint the same way. Either way, Blood Hunt should be avoided.

Labels: bad editors, crossoverloading, dreadful writers, golden calf of death, golden calf of villainy, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, violence